Us

The Project on the Engraved Sources of Spanish Colonial Art (PESSCA) was born of a desire to document the role of prints in the production of Spanish Colonial Art. PESSCA was launched at the University of California at Davis in the Spring of 2005, where it was couched within Almagest, the web-based archive developed at Princeton University. Key to this effort was the technical help of Robert Burnett, Gabriel Unda, Earl Schellhouse, and Kirk Alexander.

Originally, PESSCA consisted of seven correspondences between prints and paintings. Little by little they grew—first to one hundred, then to two, and then to three. At that point the project spawned a site of its own. This would not have been possible without the technical help of Cody Brimhall.

As the number of correspondences grew into the thousands, a major revision of the site —one that allowed more dynamic— became necessary. This was made possible by financial support from the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the technical expertise of Steve McMahon, from Reid-Mcmahon LLC.

In the winter of 2008 PESSCA developed a second home at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) thanks to the support of Marco Curatola, Krzysztof Makowski, Cécile Michaud, Elio Vélez, and Pepi Patrón. A year later, it inspired a major art exhibit at the Centro Cultural of this university. The continued support from this institution via Susana Reisz is much appreciated. In 2016, a full mirror site of PESSCA was installed in the servers of the PUCP with the help of Steve McMahon, Luis Maguiña, and Shehzad Lokhandwalla.